Elsevier

Cognition

Volume 108, Issue 1, July 2008, Pages 69-99
Cognition

THE BACON not the bacon: How children and adults understand accented and unaccented noun phrases

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.01.001Get rights and content

Abstract

Two eye-tracking experiments examine whether adults and 4- and 5-year-old children use the presence or absence of accenting to guide their interpretation of noun phrases (e.g., the bacon) with respect to the discourse context. Unaccented nouns tend to refer to contextually accessible referents, while accented variants tend to be used for less accessible entities. Experiment 1 confirms that accenting is informative for adults, who show a bias toward previously-mentioned objects beginning 300 ms after the onset of unaccented nouns and pronouns. But contrary to findings in the literature, accented words produced no observable bias. In Experiment 2, 4 and 5 year olds were also biased toward previously-mentioned objects with unaccented nouns and pronouns. This builds on findings of limits on children’s on-line reference comprehension [Arnold, J. E., Brown-Schmidt, S., & Trueswell, J. C. (2007). Children’s use of gender and order-of-mention during pronoun comprehension. Language and Cognitive Processes], showing that children’s interpretation of unaccented nouns and pronouns is constrained in contexts with one single highly accessible object.

Introduction

Learning to understand language involves more than just words and grammatical rules. Children must learn to interpret words and sentences by connecting them with the preceding discourse and the larger context – and to do so very rapidly, as each word and sentence comes at them. This study investigates young children’s ability to generate on-line hypotheses about the referent of expressions like the bagel, with a focus on understanding whether children utilize the presence or absence of an accent to guide these hypotheses. Unaccented words tend to refer to information that is highly accessible in the discourse, while accented words tend to refer to less accessible information (e.g., Venditti & Hirschberg, 2003). Research has shown that adults are highly sensitive to this information, and use it rapidly to guide their interpretation of the nominal referring expression (Dahan, Tanenhaus, & Chambers, 2002). It is not known how accenting is used by children during reference comprehension. Furthermore, what is known about reference comprehension in children presents conflicting information about their ability to integrate linguistic referring expressions with the discourse context.

When adults interpret spoken referential expressions, they rapidly utilize detailed information about the linguistic expression to identify the most likely referent. This process is embedded in discourse processing mechanisms whereby adults maintain a mental representation of the entities in the current discourse situation (e.g., Bower and Morrow, 1990, Bransford et al., 1972, Johnson-Laird, 1983, Kintsch, 1988, Sanford and Garrod, 1981, Van Dijk and Kintsch, 1983, Zwaan and Radvansky, 1998). Those entities that are more salient, or central to the situation are represented as more cognitively accessible (see Arnold, in press, Gundel et al., 1993, Sanford and Garrod, 1981), possibly by means of greater activation in the mental model of the discourse (Arnold, 1998, Arnold and Griffin, 2007). Modulations in referent accessibility have been explained in terms of how people allocate attention differentially to discourse characters (e.g., Arnold and Lao, 2007, Bower and Morrow, 1990; see also Foraker & McElree, 2007). Those entities that attract the listeners’ attentional resources are often termed “in focus”. However, this term should not be confused with the linguistic term focus (as opposed to topic/theme).

Referent accessibility is a critical factor guiding reference interpretation. It is easier to resolve expressions when the referent is contextually accessible, in particular when the expression is lexically or acoustically attenuated. For example, pronominal expressions are initially assumed to refer to the most accessible entity in the discourse that matches their features (e.g., Arnold et al., 2000, Gordon et al., 1993, Grosz et al., 1995).

There are a variety of discourse and non-discourse factors that influence the accessibility of discourse entities, but in general listeners focus on things that have been mentioned recently, in particular those mentioned in prominent syntactic or thematic positions (see Arnold, 1998; for a review); acoustic prominence has also been argued to increase the activation of entity representations in the discourse model for subsequent reference (Foraker, Nusbaum, & Schoeneman, 2007). One well-established tendency is for adults to perceive the entity appearing in first-mentioned or subject position as more accessible (e.g., Gernsbacher et al., 1989, Kaiser and Trueswell, 2007). For example, Arnold et al. (2000) monitored participants’ eye movements as they viewed a picture and decided if it matched a story, e.g., Donald is bringing some mail to Minnie…. She’s carrying an umbrella…. In situations like this example, where the pronoun only matched one character’s gender, adults began looking at the referent of the pronoun around 200 ms after the pronoun’s offset, indicating a rapid use of gender information to interpret the pronoun. In another condition, Minnie was replaced with Mickey, which required listeners to use information from the discourse context to infer which character was more prominent in the story, and assign the pronoun to that character. Adults looked at the target character just as quickly as in the gender-disambiguated case, but only when it referred to the first-mentioned/subject character from the context sentence (Arnold et al., 2000). This first-mentioned/subject bias is a robust finding with adults (Gernsbacher, 1989, Gordon et al., 1993, Järvikivi et al., 2005, Kaiser and Trueswell, 2007; see Arnold, 1998, for a review).

A similar bias occurs when adults interpret unaccented nominal referring expressions. Spoken words can be pronounced with or without a pitch accent, which is a phonological feature that signals prominence, usually with pitch movement and a local pitch maximum or minimum; in English accents also correlate with longer durations and greater acoustic intensity (e.g., Ladd, 1996). Although the location of accents in an utterance is heavily determined by the linguistic focus structure of the sentence, it also correlates with discourse status. It is frequently claimed that accented words refer to things that are new to the discourse, whereas unaccented words are for given (previously mentioned) information (e.g., Brown, 1983, Chafe, 1987). However, recent evidence suggests that a more precise characterization is that accenting occurs with relatively inaccessible referents, both given and new, and unaccented forms are reserved for highly accessible referents (Hirschberg, 1993, Hirschberg and Pierrehumbert, 1986; for a review see Venditti & Hirschberg, 2003). For example, unaccented variants tend to occur when the referent was mentioned in the previous clause in a parallel syntactic position to the current referring expression (Terken & Hirschberg, 1994). The effect of discourse status on the acoustic properties of a word is not limited to accenting, per se. Even accented words are systematically acoustically attenuated when they refer to entities that have been previously mentioned (Bard & Aylett, 1999, see also Bard and Aylett, 2004, Bard et al., 2000, Fowler and Housum, 1987), especially those in salient discourse positions (Watson & Arnold, 2005).

The above patterns mean that accenting and acoustic prominence could signal the listener about the discourse status of the referent – an unaccented and attenuated expression is likely to have a highly accessible referent, while an accented expression is likely to refer to something less accessible, or discourse new.1 Thus, unaccented variants can direct the listener to look for the referent in the discourse model, whereas accented tokens may suggest the construction of a new discourse representation.

There is substantial evidence that adults do use accenting and acoustic prominence during reference comprehension. Terken and Nooteboom (1987) reported faster comprehension for unaccented words with given (previously-mentioned) referents, and for accented words with new referents. Similarly, listeners in Bock and Mazzella’s (1983) study understood sentences faster when the new information was accented, and the given information was unaccented. In both of these studies, the preference for unaccented tokens occurred when the referent had been mentioned in a parallel syntactic position as the referring expression, for both subject and nonsubject positions. Listeners can also have more specific interpretations for different kinds of pitch accents, as has been found for German (Baumann and Grice, 2004, Baumann and Grice, 2006, Baumann and Hadelich, 2003.).

Moreover, adults can use accenting information extremely rapidly. Dahan et al. (2002) monitored participants’ eye movements using a visual world paradigm (Tanenhaus, Spivey-Knowlton, Eberhard, & Sedivy, 1995). In their experiment 1, participants saw displays similar to Fig. 1, and followed instructions like Put the candle/candy below the triangle. Now put the CANDLE/candle above the square. The target instruction was the second one, in which the theme noun was either accented or unaccented. The expression was either anaphoric, in which case it referred to the object previously-mentioned in the highly salient position of theme in the first utterance, or it was nonanaphoric, referring to a previously unmentioned entity.

Dahan et al.’s (2002) study capitalized on the fact that objects like candy/candle and bacon/bagel have names termed cohort competitors, which are words that overlap at their onset, creating a temporary ambiguity (Marslen-Wilson, 1987). This causes listeners to fixate the competitor objects at the onset of the target word on some proportion of the trials (e.g., Allopenna et al., 1998, Tanenhaus et al., 1995). Critically, the level of competition depended on the accenting of the expression and the discourse status of the referent: If the competitor had been previously mentioned, participants looked at it more often when the expression was unaccented, and if the competitor was new, participants looked at it more often in the accented condition. This difference began to emerge around 300 ms after the onset of the referring expression, revealing that adults detected the presence or absence of an accent extremely rapidly, and used it to guide their first hypotheses about the word’s referent.

It is important to note that the interpretation of accented and unaccented expressions never occurs in a vacuum. Variation in accenting necessarily co-occurs with other prosodic changes to an utterance, since accenting is realized partially in comparison with other nearby elements. For example, in Dahan et al.’s (2002) study the unaccented condition always used a prominently accented preposition (Now put the candle ABOVE the square). Thus, the effects of accenting (or lack of it) may be in fact the result of a combination of acoustic features in an utterance. Likewise, Birch and Clifton (1995) demonstrate that listeners consider the entire phrase when assessing the meaningful interpretation of accenting.

In contrast with adults, the literature offers mixed evidence about whether preschoolers use the discourse context to guide their initial interpretation of referring expressions. There are no prior studies of how accenting guides children’s reference comprehension. The most relevant information about preschoolers’ reference comprehension skills comes from pronoun studies, which provide mixed findings about children’s sensitivity to the discourse context.

Arnold et al. (2007, experiment 2) examined how children interpret pronouns on-line, examining their earliest hypotheses about the pronoun referent. In the same task as used by Arnold et al. (2000), the eye movements of 4 and 5 year olds were monitored as they viewed a picture and listened to stories (e.g., Donald is bringing some mail to Mickey…He…). When the pronoun was disambiguated by gender, children identified the referent just as quickly as adults. However, they were not systematically biased toward the first-mentioned character in same-gender items. Results from an offline task with 3–5 year olds (experiment 1) were consistent with the online results, revealing no tendency to associate the pronoun with the first-mentioned character.

These results initially appear to be at odds with Song and Fisher’s (2005) findings. In their eyetracking experiments, 3-year-olds viewed pictures and listened to stories. The context segment of the stories was longer, and established a clear discourse topic by mentioning the first-mentioned character more than once and, in most experiments, by pronominalizing reference to the discourse topic prior to the critical reference, e.g.,: Meet the crocodile and the toad. The crocodile went on vacation with the toad. And she swam in the sea with the toad. This was followed by a target sentence, She/The crocodile walked along the beach with the toad. Their participants showed a bias to look at a picture in which the pronoun referred to the first-mentioned character, although this bias did not show up until a full second after pronoun onset. Similar findings were reported by Pyykkönen, Matthews, and Järvikivi (2007), whose 3-year-old subjects showed evidence of a subject/first-mention bias but not until 2 s after pronoun onset.

One interpretation for these contrasting results builds on the observation that discourse accessibility varies along a continuum. In Song and Fisher’s (2005) study, multiple mechanisms clearly established one character as highly accessible, for example repeated mention, first mention, and pronominalization. In this situation, children linked the pronoun to the more accessible character (although not as quickly as adults). By contrast, Arnold et al. (2007) manipulated accessibility through a simple order-of-mention contrast. Although this is a robust cue for adults, it is a probabilistic cue and by itself did not guide children’s initial interpretations (for further discussion, see Arnold et al., 2007).

Thus, the literature on children’s pronoun comprehension suggests that children have some ability to interpret referential expressions with respect to the discourse context. At the same time, their ability to do so is limited to situations where a single character is clearly and redundantly marked as the most accessible one, and they may not be able to use accessibility to guide their very earliest interpretations.

The current study seeks to extend our understanding of preschoolers’ moment-by-moment processes of interpreting spoken referential expressions, by investigating their understanding of accented and unaccented referential expressions. There is no currently available data about children’s use of accenting during reference comprehension. The only evidence of children’s sensitivity to the relationship between accenting and discourse status comes from production studies, which show that English-speaking preschoolers produce adult-like accenting in their own speech, preferring accented tokens for new referents, and unaccented ones for given referents (Hornby and Hass, 1970, MacWhinney and Bates, 1978, Wieman, 1976). However, these findings do not mean that children can also use accenting during comprehension. If children produce unaccented variants for accessible referents because of production-internal facilitation (cf claims by Bard et al., 2000), they may not know that other speakers use accenting systematically as well.

The literature on children’s pronoun comprehension suggests that children would stand the best chance of utilizing accenting if the discourse situation established a clear distinction in accessibility. The following study therefore examines accenting in a context where one candidate referent is previously-mentioned and highly accessible, and the other is new (unmentioned). Previously mentioned referents are usually more accessible than unmentioned ones, in that discourse participants can presume such information to be known and accessible to all other discourse participants (Clark & Marshall, 1981). By contrast, there is less information about whether one’s interlocutors are focusing their attention on unmentioned objects, even if they are visible in the discourse context. The performance of 4- and 5-year-old children is examined, given the contrasting predictions for this age group that emerge from the literature on pronoun comprehension.

The following two experiments examined adults’ and children’s use of accenting during on-line reference comprehension, using the same experimental design as Dahan et al. (2002, experiment 1). Participants viewed a display with four objects, two of which had names that were cohort competitors (e.g., bagel/bacon), and followed instructions like in Table 1. The context sentence (e.g., Put the bacon on the star) established a clear contrast in accessibility: the bacon was previously mentioned and in the highly accessible theme position. Also, since the theme of the first instruction is the only object manipulated, we know with relative certainty that the participant is focusing on it at the onset of the second instruction. The bagel, by contrast, is unmentioned and therefore far less accessible than the bacon. If accenting guides on-line comprehension as in Dahan et al.’s experiment, unaccented expressions should result in faster target looks in the anaphoric (given target) condition, and accented expressions should result in faster target looks in the nonanaphoric (new target) condition. As a control condition, we also examined the comprehension of pronominal instructions, Now put it…. Experiment 1 establishes adult performance in this task, and Experiment 2 investigates performance on the same task by 4- and 5-year-old children.

The experiment used cohort competitors to establish a temporary ambiguity, providing an ideal method for identifying listeners’ earliest hypotheses about the referent. If listeners can identify the word as accented or unaccented during the first syllable of the word, they may integrate the accenting with the temporarily ambiguous input. The first looks after the onset of the target word thus indicate listeners’ biases during reference interpretation.

Adults prefer to interpret both pronouns and unaccented nouns as coreferential with highly accessible information. This predicts that children’s interpretation of unaccented noun phrases should use similar mechanisms as their interpretation of pronouns. If the above interpretation of the pronoun literature is right, then children should be able to link unaccented expressions with the more accessible referent, if there is only one highly accessible entity in the context. Furthermore, on some views of language development, the order in which children acquire processing skills is related to the amount of information available in the input, where stronger patterns, with more substantial and reliable evidence, are learned earlier (Arnold et al., 2007, Trueswell and Gleitman, 2004). This would predict an early use of accenting patterns for on-line comprehension if these patterns are robust in child-directed speech. Indeed, there is substantial information available in the speech input about the distribution of unaccented and accented expressions. The adult pattern of using unaccented expressions for given and accessible referents is present in child-directed speech as well (Fisher & Tokura, 1995). More generally, speech to children tends to have attenuated pronunciations for words that are predictable from the discourse or physical context (Bard and Anderson, 1983, Bard and Anderson, 1994). If children can detect and categorize tokens by acoustic prominence, they should have amassed a large database of accented and unaccented words at a very young age.

However, evidence from pronoun comprehension suggests that 4- to 5-year-old children may not be able to integrate pragmatic biases with discourse accessibility quickly enough to affect their initial interpretation of the referential expression. While children interpret gender-disambiguated pronouns as quickly as adults (Arnold et al., 2007), manipulations of accessibility either have not influenced young children’s interpretations (Arnold et al., 2007), or have done so only a second or two after the critical expression (Pyykkönen et al., 2007, Song and Fisher, 2005).

Section snippets

Participants

Fourty-nine native English-speaking students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill participated in exchange for course credit. Data from 13 were excluded: 7 because of technical problems, 5 because of calibration problems of track loss, and 1 because the participant had to leave before finishing the experiment. This left 36 participants in the analysis.

Methods and materials

Participants were asked to wear a visor for the purposes of monitoring their eye movements. They viewed pictures on a computer

Participants

Twenty-seven children in the Chapel Hill/Durham area participated in the experiment in exchange for a small toy; their parent received $5 for each child participating. Seven participants were excluded from analysis: 3 because of technical problems, 2 because they did not attend to the task (e.g., talking during the critical items), and 2 because they were confused about many items or made too many mistakes on the context instruction. This left 20 participants in the analysis; 11 were girls, 9

General discussion

The results presented here reveal that 4- and 5-year-old children are fairly adept at using accenting information during their on-line interpretation of referential expressions. Unaccented expressions were more likely than accented ones to lead children to initially look at objects that were previously-mentioned and highly accessible – the same pattern as observed for adults. Furthermore, children were most likely to pick up the wrong object when an unaccented expression did the pragmatically

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